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[SafariJohn]

The ships giving more feedback as to what they're doing would also help immensely. When a ship disobeys a player's order, there is no feedback as to why the ship is ignoring the player's order. Having it say something like "holding off -- flux too high" or "too many enemy missiles" or "too many enemy ships nearby" or "being harassed by frigates" or "need more reinforcements" or whatever would help the player learn what the AI is actually thinking. Right now the system is pretty much opaque, so the player simply sees the AI disobeying commands without really understanding why, leading to player frustration.

Ships should somehow say things to the player that gives feedback on why they are behaving the way they are, especially when they are deviating from an order.

[THE SHAMBLER]

Amazing idea honestly!

[TheLaughingDead]

I think the overall idea is pretty good, but how exactly would it work? Like, would the dialogue/communication be shown in the top left like ships destruction/retreat? If so, wouldn't that clutter important information about ships passing off the map or points being captured?
And even if they could send feedback, at what point would they? Would ships straying from a defend order report not being able to defend? Is that a distance from the defend order, or them backing off the point?
Or for an eliminate order, if they are "deviating" from the order, does that mean not engaging the target? Should they announce every time they are too high on flux and are backing off? What if they aren't approaching the enemy ship because they are physically blocked?
I think the concept is good, and would help mitigate a lot of complaints people have with the AI. One of the main hangups I see people have on the forums, on the Discord, and rarely even on Reddit, is that they don't understand why the AI is either too timid, or too aggressive, or why it hangs back against some overloaded enemy, or won't move in to use a certain weapon, or or or. Adding transparency to that system would be a massive step to alleviating some of those frustrations, especially for newer players! But regarding the specifics in cases like these, it is hard to understand how that might be communicated.

[llama]

I think it could just go in the target information next to the armor cells etc. This would require any ship to be target-selectable at any time as well.

[Zsar]

That would be so much help!

Today for the first time in the 0.96 series of versions I had that strange fleet behaviour again, where somehow none of the ships wants to attack, even with direct Eliminate orders. It used to happen way more often in 0.95.1a and I was so far pretty glad it seemed to be gone for good.

- It would be so great to see some sort of report on what exactly the ships "think" they are doing in such a case. E.g. if a ship displayed something like "current action: Strike <target>" (the "divebombing" behaviour enabled by having a weapon with the "STRIKE" tag), while being nowhere near <target> or obviously not moving into weapons range to <target>, that would be an easy bug report.

Similarly, ships with high flux sometimes just do not want to disengage (this seems to happen just as often in 0.96a-RC10 as before). If they reported something like "current action: disengaging" while not actually moving away, again: Easy bug report.